


Anesthesia

by maevestrom



Category: Original Work
Genre: Actually the whole thing is basically cancer, Anesthesia, Art, Cancer, Chemotherapy, Depression, Doctors & Physicians, Family, Friendship, Health Insurance, Hospitalization, Hospitals, Mentions of Cancer, Other, Transphobia, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-26
Updated: 2018-10-26
Packaged: 2019-08-07 18:25:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16413539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maevestrom/pseuds/maevestrom
Summary: A tale of brain cancer, of how the grey sea swallows you, of how you let it





	Anesthesia

**Author's Note:**

> This is a very autobiographical story about my own experiences with brain cancer that should have been fatal. Things will be uncomfortably detailed. If you want no part in that, I understand and fully respect that, but realize that going in. There's also a mention of a famous media example of transphobia so cw for that too

The first time you wake up from it it’s nighttime, a lot later than you were told beforehand. You don’t know where you are at first but keep your panic introverted, because you know there’s a reason you’re here, in the hospital bed with no pants on and a bandage on the back of your head.

Eventually, your parents come through with some food, not expecting you to be awake. You’re too sloppy to tell them it’s okay so you just think the words aloud and act like they heard them. As a peace offering, they throw you a bag of chips, which is really all that it takes to calm you down.

They tell you that the surgery took longer than they thought, that the surgeons had to carve a piece of your skull and that when you came back you were slurring your speech and acting goofier than normal. As they speak, you remember your last moments- lying on your front with your bare ass to the world, M83 on the radio to carry you off, the surgeons informing you about what was about to happen to you- as it was happening to you. Then, you remember being here. Nothing in between- in fact, it only feels like a few seconds yet an eternity at once.

You try and piece together what it was like as your parents explain your surgery with canned laughter and forced smiles to hide their fear, but if you were honest you would tell them it wasn’t the surgery you were confused about at all.

\------

The next couple of months go through the motions only for you. You remember first and foremost you spending most of your time lying down on three pillows to get an incline and the staple scars on the back of your head, so inflated with… something, that your head juts a couple of inches back.

Apparently in between all of these there are various meetings with oncologists who try and formulate different plans, an operation to put a port inside your chest, condolences from your family members, and visits more for the good of them than you, and sometimes lying down you think, hey, remember last week when you didn’t know you had cancer? That week turns into weeks, then months, and eventually feels like forever, but before you can think about it you lie down and try and sleep some more.

\-----

Eventually, you’re told of the treatment path, which is stressed to you as the only way that your rare form of brain cancer can be treated. The treatment is deemed experimental, a word that will come back to haunt you, and if not for your insurance you’d be out a couple million dollars, and you know you don’t have more than four digits.

You instead focus on the treatment, which sounds... Glamorous. A tube straight into your brain, something about sugars and disrupting the blood-brain barrier, or BBBD. You focus on the negatives- vomiting, week-long hospital stays, catheters, chemo, exhaustion- but figure it best not to look a gift horse in the mouth even though it feels like it’s spitting on you.

One thing piques your ears, and it relieves you a little. _Anesthesia._ It’s a simple thought but it’s never escaped your mind because at least it’s time out. It’s a short time where you can escape treatment. A respite.

As you go home your mind drifts to that now and again. Maybe you’re turning into an optimist. Funny how all it took was brain cancer for that.

\------

The first treatment rolls around, and you try and get used to it all. It’s gonna be your new normal, may as well. You try and get used to the two needles in your chest, the wheelchair rides and hour-long MRIs that you cannot move in, the two-thirty bedtimes and six-thirty wakeups, but as all of them pass you’re dreading them again.

You’re finally woken up from sleep, told not to eat or drink anything until it’s over. Now that they mention it, you’re craving just about everything, but decide to be a good girl and not mention it. Eventually, far later than you were told, a smaller hospital bed is transported to you and you’re told it’s your turn. You pull your IV roller behind you like a jawless zombie and allow the staff to drag you to the operating room, positioning you on the outside when you remember the anesthesia.

The thrill of doing new things already has consumed you, even though you know the treatment will be unpleasant. So why is it that the one thing you’re familiar with excites you the most?

\-----

You wake up back in your room with the catheter in and instructions not to walk. You’re bored as hell and uncomfortable in ways you didn’t think were possible. You can’t reach your phone so all you can do is think. When you run out of nothing to think of, you think of nothing.

It’s more familiar in your memory, but you could be filling in the gaps with your own reality. You relax against your hospital bed, but you can’t empty your mind, because even if it all goes away, you keep thinking of how you wish you could move, how you wish the catheter was gone, how you wish you were not tethered to your IV, how you wish you were at home lying on your bed behind the TV playing a loud and violent Netflix show you’ve heard and scented candles your mother put on the counter slab by the refrigerator, how much you wish you weren’t here, and it makes you cry to want everything to change so much, and it’s so unfair that feeling things at all is the worst part of this whole illness.

\---

When you arrive home you can almost forget that you might die.

Perhaps it’s the feeling of freedom that has left you so euphoric. Perhaps it’s the invisibility of the disease that lets you forget. You go to your cousin’s baby shower, so happy deep down that your family is progressing through life so enviously admirably. You order Chinese food with your mom when you stay at home all day and listen to her favorite shows from your bed. You talk to friends and downplay everything- the fact that walking up the hotel steps to your room pains you, the fact that you can’t see everything in single vision when you’re being driven to doctor’s appointments, the fact that you’d probably suffocate medical transport with a flu mask if they would show up- because you want to hear about their lives, because you’ve got nothing going on. You’ve got so little going on you feel shameful in comparison.

Then the next session starts to roll around. You dread it. You dread it a week before it happens. You already want it done and over with, but you’ve grown so attached to home that you can’t imagine leaving it. When you’re at the hospital, you wish you hadn’t.

\---

You wake up at the edge of the waiting room just after anesthesia. You’re covered by a single white blanket that has lost its warmth. The clock reads 11:30 am, just an hour after you went under, but it feels like longer and shorter than that. Like nothing at all.

You wish you were back there for the rest of the day, but that empty longing is all that you feel.

\---

By the time the next hospital trip rolls around, you and your family have a suitcase packed. Clothes- of which there are few, books, which you will never read, your laptop, which will be all you use, and a painting from your mother, who has taken up the craft recently. The painting has pictures of all of you from the family circle, and while there are a few of you before your transition, well, you look like a fat mountain man more than a frail dying woman right now, so you set the discomfort aside, because it is nice to see and it is kind of her. Just her luck that her baby came out and then immediately caught a tumor.

In the center, she’s written “Life Doesn’t Get Easier We Get Stronger” with a lymphoma ribbon dividing the sentiment in a clean half.

You’ve set up a routine when you arrive at the hospital, too. Carting your suitcase around on its wheels even when it starts to twist and flop, you eat a markedly unhealthy salad because hospital food differs in your room and you will get sick of it. You take the elevator to your room afterward and unpack everything in a far more careful way than you treat the objects in your space at home. You set the painting on the daybed in front of you. You turn on the TV just to hear the sound make the room feel less empty. You take your meds before the MRI so you can sleep through it.

Then the next morning, you get the BBBD, and this time you’re able to appreciate how quickly the anesthesia puts you under. This time, it lasts longer than it should. You don’t think. You don’t dream. You are not in this broken diseased mind atop this weakened atrophied body. You are a beautiful and remarkable sea of grey.

You wake up and hold onto the feeling even as it slips through your fingers like grains of sand.

\---

You aren’t home for a few days into the three weeks before you get the news.

You don’t react, because saying the words is too painful. Your mom makes you say them so you get the gravity of the situation, to know that you’re not as dumb as you want to be as to why she’s crying, why she’s so sorry that this is happening to you, that the insurance company is fighting to take away coverage from the BBBD, and if they’re successful, there’s nowhere else to go.

It all comes to a head. It all gets to you. You don’t say anything as your dad puts his phone in a metal Tupperware for the sounds of every arbitration to echo off of, as he tries to put forth that _this is a human life, this is_ **_your_ ** _life,_ in tones that imply that he is fighting every impulse to scream at them harder than you think you are fighting this disease. When you sleep at night, you can only hear the sounds of the insurance company calling it too experimental to cover, while the arbiter is forced to call them in so they can explain why your life is not worth $2,000,000.

You can’t wait to go back to the hospital because you can’t stop hearing it. You can’t stop the words from ringing in your head from the original voices to a caricature of anger to a summation of the feeling that the world has deemed that you are not worth saving. By the time the day rolls around, you can’t help but wait for the anesthesia like a lover parted from her better half for too long, so desperate you are to wash it all away, feel nothing, be the beautiful grey sea that you are.

You wake up afterward as dirty as ever.

\---

After then, it doesn’t follow a routine so much as it just happens.

Your brother’s school gives you a whole host of gifts for Christmas that you feel you don’t deserve, but every night you snuggle into the white lace blanket they give you. It finds its way into your suitcase. You try and treat him better but when it all gets to be too much he’s the first you yell at, and you wonder what sort of memories you are leaving him with before you chase all signs of finality out of your head.

The new year rolls around and you start going to get your blood drawn for labs. Maybe you already were, and you only now noticed. While at labs you talk to fewer and fewer friends on your phone, not telling one about what happened, what the insurance company said, how close you are to dying, so they are not as brokenhearted as the family that has no choice but to be destroyed with you.

At the turn of the year, it starts to snow. You wouldn’t know it, because so much of your time spent in bed, snuggled up in sweaters and blankets that do not make you feel hidden enough. You spend your time filling your drawer with snacks and gain weight, morbidly noting that you may be the only cancer patient to get fat.

When you get to the hospital, it feels like the only physically or emotionally healthy thing you do.

\---

You’re finally cleared.

You get the news that you’re being legally covered despite the insurance company’s wishes. You wait for the call all day and take it as a family. When you hear the good news, your mother starts crying, your brother hugs you for one of the few times in his most recent teenage year, and your father gives a little all’s-well-that-ends-well speech, and you feel nothing.

It still doesn’t feel over yet.

You’re not out of the woods.

\---

Do you try to get your life back?

Performatively. That’s what you think your family would want to see. You’re a little more active, a little more in control, a little more spontaneous. But you’re not you.

You can’t focus enough to write- the words leave your thoughts before you can put them down and you don’t have the attention span to fight back. You make new friends, but you don’t tell them much of anything, and you don’t get back your old ones to disappoint them with how broken you are. You function as a doll at family events- your aunt’s wedding, your cousin’s daughter’s birthday- being lovely, pretty, and not really doing much of anything but basking in the unearned glory of being alive for now.

When you go in for the BBBD treatment, you anticipate the anesthetic so much that you’re starting to spoil it for yourself. You know when it will happen, what to expect, and what you want to feel. The times it does not feel real, it feels forced, like you want to be someone, like you want to be something beautiful, remarkable, but even as you are put under its spell and feel nothing, it feels barely any different from how you live otherwise.

\---

You go through the motions again in April, but the doctors take you in a different direction after the MRI. They X-Ray you, examine you, and try a different treatment on you. After too long of your mother’s over-the-phone questions, the oncologist tells you, in the surprisingly blunt yet kind way he always does, that your cancer is growing and rebounding, and they are trying to figure out what they can do. It’s not until your mother demands to visit and shows up within the hour that you wonder if there is anything they _can_ do.

You stay quiet and numb as your visits change from one week a month to one week every two weeks, as you’re flooded with toxins your body doesn’t expel fast enough, but you only show emotion for the first time when a TV show makes you cry. A goddamn TV show breaks you when a rare case of cancer cannot. It reminds you that even if everything were to magically disappear, as though it never happened, your life will be difficult, painful, and a constant mess of jagged, ugly emotion that all the anesthesia in the world could not make go away.

Maybe if miracles exist, one shouldn’t be wasted on you.

You don’t vocalize this to your family, even as you hear your mother cry from the other part of the room, watching it on her phone and thinking of you, and even as your brother asks why you’re crying and you feel too pathetic to tell him. This is not a fight you need to worry about, because pretty soon it won’t matter at all.

You almost envy that moment.

\---

You aren’t sure why you’re in the ER. Your eyes got a little puffy. Your mom keeps insisting that it’s worse than you think, but you just wanna go home and sleep it off. You keep thinking of one of your friends, your new friends, the one that makes you think of foxes, and how the hospital is keeping you for so long that you may not talk to him. You think of a pretty and hilarious girl going through a painful time and the crush is the closest thing you have to a feeling, but your words are only words until your phone dies and you can’t say anything else.

Nothing seems to come of it, but you’re just discovering July Talk on the local alternative radio under a bridge when your mom starts crying again at the wheel. You don’t know why and are afraid to ask so you comfort her like you aren’t making it worse. You don’t want to be comforted because that means you know you’re in pain.

A tiny young man with a gravelly voice proclaims about how sick he is of picturing love like that should make sense to everyone, but you can’t even picture a life anymore. You used to wish everything was a beautiful, remarkable grey sea, but it’s a drab, lifeless grey fog that you can’t feel.

\---

You never are put under anesthesia again.

You are anesthesia.

\---

As a last resort, they truly put you on experimental medication. You don’t have much of a choice. You are long past the date of dying with dignity. They could pump you with IVs of things that give you a third arm and make you attack the city as long as you… as long as… it’s better. Whatever it is. The novelty of the idea gives you pause. Maybe this one will work.

You visit one of your mentors and an old friend that probably has forgotten about you over time. You smile being with them, lying on the dirt of a school park, happy to hear about their lives, resistant to telling them anything about yours. It won’t end well. Besides, the more you hear of them, the more heartened you feel that the people you love are happy.

The new chemo is a lot easier to deal with- you can even make it home on the bus by choice if you so wish, and you still want to murder medical transport so you do it often to get home at a reasonable hour. It almost feels like something is going better until they start bringing palliative care in and you realize that it’s truly possible that nothing has changed at all.

\---

You’re in an office with a woman from palliative care, your mom, and your dad. After this, you will meet with your oncologist- the blunt, comforting one- about how your brain looks after your first round of experimental treatment. It should be a source of optimism, but yesterday was the Fourth of July and you threw up enough that your family left with you before the sun went down. Now you’re in a dark room lit up by a computer screen and a dim bulb that showcases the carpeting and its pattern which you follow like a religion, while your parents think of questions to ask the oncologist that they won’t think to at the time.

The questions are all how long and all from your father. _How long until she starts to noticeably lose brain function? How long until we have to put her in a hospice? How long until she stops being responsive?_ Ways to get around asking “how long until she dies?”

Then the woman asks you if you have any questions you want to ask the doctor. Your parents look at you, tears in their eyes, and you stammer and try to find words, but they escape you. They’ve always escaped you. You can’t think, can’t speak, can’t move, can’t do _anything_.

You’ve finally done it. You are finally nothing at all. 

  
  
  



End file.
